I've only watched 10 minutes of the TV show The Biggest Loser and even that was too long of my life quite frankly. They show a bit of a back story on this woman before she gets on the scale where she is talking about her weight, commenting on how she is learning to eat better, mixed in the flashes of her exercising like she's some sort of crazed athletic maniac. Her whole team is surrounding her, waiting with baited breath to find out just how great is loss will be, the pressure builds...did she loose 3...maybe 5 pounds this week? She steps atop the scale and then the number displays....she's gained 2.2 pounds......Gasps can be heard by all, you can see in her eyes the sheer devastation.....and here's me screaming at the television, "OMG are you freaking serious....maybe it's her time of the month, did anyone think of that or take that into account? You know the whole being a woman thing?" The answer is no, they never do.

We are taught on our weight loss journey that losing weight is what matters, seeing that smaller and smaller number on the scale reinforces the progress we are (or should be) making and when we don't achieve a loss of number....we are failures. We haven't exercised enough or eaten correctly that week and so now we are just a group of big, stupid, pathetic losers.

I think that success should be measured a multitude of ways and just because you are stagnant in one area for a while, that doesn't mean you are failing. The scale doesn't tell the whole story, it never has, regardless of whether the number is moving up or down. And as women, we have extra struggles in regards to just how our body functions. The key is accepting this, embracing it, and continuing to move forward without letting the number derail your progress.

The defeatist mindset becomes engrained into a fat person's way of thinking and self-definition, especially in the United States. Fat people are not viewed on a whole as successful, smart, or attractive. Funny and jolly are the only stereotypes that are accepted and embraced throughout society, heaven help you if you don't fit in that box. So when you gain weight through natural means, it negates nothing, you still struggle with feelings of failure which leave your spirit battered and beaten.

So these moments in the journey are ones we have to fight through, claw through, bleed through. These are the moments that hurt, that leave scars, that cause pain. These moments try to break us, crush us, cheat us out of the success we've already achieved. These are the moments that make us human and eventually will make us heroes.